“Any political posts made on the Surfer Forum will be removed and your account will be terminated.”
With just 164 days left until Don and Joe fight for America's right to swing their wheels, Surfer magazine responded by banning all readers from expressing personal political opinions in its forums.
Surfer magazine, which was recently featured on BeachGrit for an ad seeking humans to monitor its AI-driven content, devotes more than 1,000 pages to its political forums, covering everything from the Ukraine-Russia war to political assassinations in Slovakia to Peru's decision to classify transgender people as mentally disabled to Biden's “inflationary explosion” and Trump's “hush money.”
It is written in what one might imagine to be an eerie, sing-song voice, Surfer magazine told its readers.
“The political forum has been removed in order to keep the conversation about surfing. Let's talk surfing trips, surfboards, and the latest happenings on our beautiful blue planet. Thank you!”
And as a pinned post in the main forum:
“The Surfer.com political forum will be shut down immediately. All political posts made to the Surfer forum will be removed and accounts terminated. We want to continue to provide this forum as a surfing-related area, and we know it permeates everyday life. That said, we will not allow this forum to degenerate into a political area where people belittle others and purposely marginalize or disparage other groups or individuals.”
The fall and resurgence of the venerable magazine Surfer , which collapsed into ruins before being reborn as a dystopian zombie site with AI-generated writers, is perhaps best chronicled in this article by Santa Barbara's Jenn See.
Storytelling is one of the oldest human traditions. We've drawn pictures on cave walls, written on papyrus scrolls, and made illegible scribbles on parchment and yellow legal pads. Now we type out Instagram captions and text messages. The medium doesn't really matter.
Replacing this deeply human process with machines trained on the work of so many human writers feels like the deepest wound. Who are we without our stories? And what would we be without them? What is lost in this dystopian world of trained robots and hyper-efficient editors? Indeed, what's left is beginning to feel a lot like Roth's “claustrophobic, suffocating culture.”
Surfing is nothing without a story.
Sometimes it feels like the stories are just as important as the things themselves. Sitting around a campfire or hanging out in a parking lot, we talk about that perfect day. Maybe that day wasn't perfect, but we were there, we experienced it, and we're here to tell it.
There is something beautiful, magical, and fundamentally human about telling a story. A silly story, a true story, a completely made-up story or fiction — the important thing is that it is ours. By telling a story, we spin new threads and strengthen the ties that bind us to one another.
And isn’t that elusive connection what we’re all here trying to find?
